Timeless Reader (2): Eternity

Saturday

After Death: Being without Time

Well then, as we have no idea of time when in a perfectly unconscious state, it is all the same to us when we are dead whether three months or ten thousand years pass away in the world of consciousness. For in the one case, as in the other, we must accept on faith and trust what we are told when we awake. Accordingly it will be all the same to you whether your individuality is restored to you after the lapse of three months or ten thousand years.

Schopenhauer is trying to show us that our true essence, our true inner being, exists in a state apart from time. It is simply unaware of time. It is only our conscious awareness that keeps track of time, and when we sleep, though we are still alive, we lose this ability. Have you ever been in the Flow state when you are immensely enjoying an activity and time seems to "fly"? Or have you ever stopped to think that no matter what time it is, it is always Now? So Schopenhauer applies this to death. He thinks we will still "be", we just won't be aware of time.

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After Death: All and Nothing

Your being in itself, on the contrary, knows neither time, nor beginning, nor end, nor the limits of a given individuality; hence no individuality can be without it, but it is there in each and all. So that, in the first sense, after death you become nothing; in the second, you are and remain everything. That is why I said that after death you would be all and nothing. It is difficult to give you a more exact answer to your question than this and to be brief at the same time; but here we have undoubtedly another contradiction; this is because your life is in time and your immortality in eternity.

Don't worry, my first reaction was undoubtedly the same as yours: HUH?! But I think Schopenhauer is trying to make an intelligible point here. He believes that our individuality is simply the transient form of consciousness in the universe. That we are in fact all and everything (isn't that what the religious sages and kids that just had their first acid-trip keep trying to tell us?) but we (the universe) can only experience consciousness through individuality. So when we die, we return back to the All, which Schopenhauer says is a better form of existence anyways.